As the corporate that both invented or popularized the dive watch, the GMT watch, the primary waterproof watch, the primary computerized watches, and way more apart from, you might hardly downplay Rolex’s affect on watchmaking historical past. However whereas its iconic sports activities watches, just like the Submariner, Daytona and GMT-Grasp are endlessly imitated, Rolex just isn’t seen as a trendsetter, preferring to disregard passing horological fashions. It does its personal factor, iterating fastidiously and minimally on its age-old templates.
5 years in the past, nonetheless, Rolex launched a group so avant-garde that’s nonetheless influencing artistic selections throughout the complete watch business, and it did so in certainly one of its least-heralded fashions: the Oyster Perpetual. The thought was so easy that we’ve barely observed it turn into the business norm: As an alternative of slowly rolling out new dial colors one by one over a interval of years—which was commonplace watch world habits till that time—Rolex launched an entire set of coloured dials in a complementary palette unexpectedly.
They had been vibrant, daring and nearly childlike of their purity: coral purple, inexperienced, turquoise, pink and yellow. Rolex-watchers instantly hailed them as a tribute to the so-called Stella dial Day-Date watches of the late Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties—equally vibrant and sudden, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. However there was one thing extra fundamental, extra important and, at the least theoretically, extra attainable concerning the Oyster Perpetual assortment.
It sparked imitators left, proper and heart—and nonetheless does. Ultimately week’s Geneva Watch Days 2025, Zenith’s collaboration with Swiss furniture-maker USM would qualify as a textbook instance: a full set of daring, block-colour dials in in any other case conventional stainless-steel sports activities watches.
Earlier this yr, Oris’s Massive Crown Pointer Date hit the same observe. In 2023, arch-rival Omega debuted a group of Seamaster Aqua Terra fashions with comparable hues to Rolex’s opening salvo; different mid-level manufacturers together with Breitling and TAG Heuer have all created multi-colored households of stainless-steel, time-only spherical watches in the same mould.
